Falling Forward
by The Kuro Ryuu Katanas
Summary: When sixteen year old Rani runs away from home and is knocked down a well and finds herself in the Feudal Era, she gets a chance to have the family she never knew she needed. Koga x OC obviously


**Note: **_Wow! You actually decided to read this even though the summary sounded totally cheap! You must have either a really forgiving personality, been desensitized to bad summaries, totally ignored the summary, or really like Koga... Well, anyway, you're here. Yes, this is Aieka and yes, this is the Koga story that used to be "Life May Never Be The Same". I wanted a different title and I've changed a few things; such as, for example, the chick's name was Akira, but now it's Rani because...hehe...I sorta found out "Akira" was a dude's name... Yeah...about that...yep. What can I say? I started this like two or three years ago! (No brutal stabbings, please.) That brings me to my next point: yes, I began this YEARS ago and haven't worked on it since so I really can't seem to remember exactly where I was going with the storyline. And, on top of that, only a few of my notes on many of my stories survived my mother's idea of "tidying up". (And yes, even now, months later, I am still enraged at the thought of that incident. MONTHS OF CHARACTER AND STORY DEVELOPMENT, LOST! -children crying, dramatic music lamentation- The pain! The horror! The writer's block!) But you don't care about that; after all, I'm just here to entertain you. You don't care how I come about doing so, so long as I do it. But I have kind of what I was writing for chapters two and three; I just have to adapt it to the way I'm writing this story now. But...YOUR INPUT IS NEEDED TO KEEP THIS STORY GOING! When I write out chapter two/three and my ideas run dry, I'm going to need some ideas and suggestions or the storyline will die. I mean really, ever since I came here, I have never gotten a single review on anything! Over a hundred people reading, but absolutely no feed back or criticism or compliments or anything! PLEASE SAY SOMETHING!_

_And with that, here is chapter one of Falling Forward:_

**Chapter One: The Country House**

Rani shut and locked the front door. The house was unusually quiet.

"Hello?" she called out into the silence, her voice echoing off the high ceiling of the entrance hall and shining marble floor, "I'm back!"

No answer.

She took off her sneakers and set them by the front door. Then she heard a splash far away and then one of her twin half brothers laughter. Rani walked into the kitchen and got a glass of ice water before making her way to the pool at the back of the house.

It was about ten 'o clock at night and the pool lights in the sides of the pool and the little pop-up lights around the edge were on, casting wavy, shimmering patterns on the wall of the house and the people there about. Sure enough, there they all were: her father, her two half-brothers, and _her_. Rani's slutty twenty-eight year old step-mother. The word "mother" used loosely, of course. _Very_ loosely. Every time Rani laid eyes on her she wondered what her father saw in her. Other than maybe himself, but Rani gagged at that thought and hoped he was at least a little above that. Couldn't he see she only wanted his money? Was he so deluded that he really believed a lower-middle class twenty-eight year old super-model harlot would fall in _love _with him? An upper-class thirty-nine year old CEO? No, he couldn't be _that_ blind to reality...she hoped. Okay, so she wasn't really a super-model, she was actually unemployed, but she had the "body built just like a coke bottle" and the silky blonde hair and the blue eyes. It was enough to make Rani grit her teeth and summoned too many death metal songs to her mind, just like she had all throughout the wedding as she ground her fingertips into the underside of her pew to keep from calling the whore out to the world for the gold digging bitch she was. That or drown her in the punch bowl...

Rani leaned against the glass door and flipped her long brown hair over her shoulder and rubbed her temple in a vain attempt to keep her growing headache at bay. The movement caught the eye of Asheina, bringing a line from some TV show to Rani's mind: _A hooker's eyesight is based on movement. Maybe if we stand real still, she won't see us!_ She smiled a bit.

"Oh, hi Rani." she said, smiling as she lounged in her bikini on a pool chair.

_Aww damn, it didn't work, he was wrong..._

Her father glanced up.

"Hey, how was the movie? What did you see again?"

"_The Grudge II_, Dad." she answered.

She had been talking about it all week.

"You should go with your mom soon, sweetie," he said, playing with one of the twins, "She's been dying to see _Pirates of the Caribbean II_."

"Johnny Depp..." Asheina said wistfully.

Oh, of course he would remember that.

"You have fun with your friends?" Asheina asked, a malicious gleam in her eye, "I wouldn't want to keep you from them if you all had plans..."

She knew Rani didn't have any friends here.

Just as she was about to tell her off, one of the twins, Rei, choked on some water and her father went over to help him.

"It's settled then, you and Ashi are going to the movies together tomorrow night. You two need the bonding time." he said.

_Bastard! _Rani threw the glass of water to the ground and it shattered, scattering glass all over the porch, and she stormed upstairs to her room. She kicked her door open and grabbed her book bag and emptied in onto the floor. Then she stuffed the first things her hand touched into the bag along with all the cash she had saved in the tin box on her dresser.

Just as she was shoving her feet into her spare pair of tennis shoes after putting on a thin jacket, Asheina walked in.

"What the hell was with that shit downstairs?"

Rani slung on her pack and opened her window, letting the wind carry the fresh scent of the growing storm into her bedroom. Asheina was right behind her now.

"And where do you think you're going to get to?"

"And why would you care? You are not my mother, so I don't have to answer to you." Rani snapped.

"It would sicken me to be your mother," Asheina said, then she added matter-of-factly, "I bet the old bitch is rolling in her grave at the thought of you. Hell, you probably put her there."

Rani spun around and slapped her so hard she bounced when she hit the hardwood floor. Then she stepped up onto the windowsill and leapt to the ground two stories below. Asheina peeled herself off the floor and looked outside just in time to see Rani disappear into the forest behind the house.

Rani had played in this forest since she was a young child so she knew it well enough that she only needed the occasional flash of lightning to keep from stumbling over anything, She planned to make her way to the old dried up river and wait out the storm in the cave there. _Why couldn't I have grabbed a damn flashlight?_ she thought after she stepped into a growing mud puddle. The rain had picked up quickly and was making it even harder to see. After what had to be an hour of wandering, Rani stumbled into an unfamiliar area.

Under the branches of a large tree was an old well. _What is a well doing here in the middle of nowhere? _She sighed and leaned against the tree, admitting to herself she was lost. Then, after a flash of lightning illuminated everything, she saw something shine in the side of the well. Rani walked over to it and pulled out the shining object. Holding it close to her face, she saw it was a pink shard of something. She was still looking at it when lightning flashed, followed immediately by a loud crash of thunder. But then she heard a cracking sound coming from right above her. She looked up just in time to see a branch of the tree falling toward her. Falling faster than she could react, the branch hit her square on the head.

Both from the shock and the fact that she had just been hit in the head by a fifty pound tree branch, Rani passed out. She hung half in, half out of the well, her legs pinned by the tree branch. After a while, though, the branch slide off of her legs and she fell into the well.

- - - _with InuYasha's group - - -_

"SIT, INUYASHA!" a familiar female voice yelled, followed quickly by a loud thud.

Kagome turned her back on him, hands on her hips.

"I have to go back, InuYasha, I promi-" she stopped suddenly.

"What's your problem now?" InuYasha asked her, standing back up.

"I sense a shard," she said, "But it's sort of far off..."

She stared sorrowfully toward the direction of InuYahsa's forest, where they had been going, for a few seconds.

"Well," she sighed, "I guess I can stay just long enough to get this one..."

Everyone brightened up a bit at this.

"Well let's go before it gets away!" InuYasha said, motioning for Kagome to get on his back.

She did and Miroku, Sango and Shippo got onto the transformed Kilala and they all headed off following Kagome's directions. After a while, they came to a little clearing.

"Are you sure you sensed a shard here, Kagome?" Miroku questioned, "Isn't this Koga's territory?"

"I'm sure of it," she said, "It's over there!"

She pointed to a clump of bushes. InuYasha pulled apart the bushes, exposing a well.

"Another well?" Sango exclaimed, "But this one's boarded up..."

They pried the rotting boards off of it and peered inside. Kagome gasped.

"A girl in the well!"

**End Note**: _I know Koga hasn't showed up yet, he will. This is just the opener so it's going to be short. Remember, I NEED SOME REVIEWS!!!_


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